Multitasking: What a Professor Knows That Students Don’t

Jonathan Zimmerman is professor of education and history at New York
University. He is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red
Schoolhouse in History and Memory,

A few weeks ago, I noticed that a student was surfing the web during
my class. So I asked her to come to my office, where she told me – with
admirable boldness – that my efforts to police such behavior were
wrong-headed. She had grown up with digital technologies, she said, and
she had taught herself to “multitask” efficiently. Who was I to presume
otherwise?

“Google ‘Clifford Nass,’ ” I replied. “Just not in class.”

Nass, who died last week, was the great slayer of the modern multitasking dragon. A professor of communications at Stanford University, Nass showed that people who did several things at once did all of them worse that those who focused on one thing at a time.

And
the more we multitask, he found, the worse we get at multitasking
itself. In most human endeavors, practicing an activity makes you better
at it. Not so with multitasking: Veteran multitaskers are actually less
efficient than people who just started doing it....